Cidade Maravilhosa; World’s Ugliest Building Competition; Facades and Canonballs

 Cidade Maravilhosa means the Marvelous City for those who are not fluent in Portuguese as I have had to quickly become. I had thought Portuguese would be a slight variation, a mere dialect if you will, of Espanol but it actually seems quite different. After having mastered the 15 or 20 words that seem to make up the  core of Castellian Spanish, I am utterly flummoxed and frustrated by having to learn a new language in just a few days notwithstanding my innate language skills honed since I almost mastered French in high school.. So far I have almost gotten down “obrigado” (thank you) but one word can only take you so far especially if you mispronounce it. 

In any case, my visit to the Marvelous City (Rio) got off to a bit of an inauspicious start as my first sights on leaving the airport were a bonfire of old tires, chemical plants and )sadly) many shanty towns or slums all accompanied by a malodorous wafting smell.  Well to be fair, the airport is in an industrial district in Rio and  few of those anywhere are attractive.  

I took a walking tour of downtown Rio after arrivals.  I learned quite a bit about the history of this modern city of 13 million.  It was really put on the map by the discovery of gold some miles inland in the 1700s and was the chief port for shipments to Portugal. Also it was the first city in the New World visited by a European monarch when the king of Portugal relocated the Portuguese crown to Brazil during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800a. 

The downtown has these trees with pretty flowers that have this fruit or rather protection called cannonballs which aren’t good if they fall and hit you on the noggin

Rio protects it’s old buildings by forbidding changes to the facades which in the city they take quite literally as sometimes there is nothing but the facade-

Maybe not quite the spirit of the law. The tour guide stated that the city had some buildings that had been voted amongst the ugliest in the world-

The tour stopped at a famous and very elegant cafe founded in the 1890s and still popular-

I did take the train to the top of the mountain where there is the famous Christ the Redeemer statue. It is is indeed an awesome sight and the view from the top of the city justifies its name as the Ciduad Marvilhosa even if the weather did not yield the best pictures